There's no escaping the glare from Anderson Cooper's steely baby-blues these days. He's the youthful, prematurely gray Kim Jong-Il of media cool, his image plastered all over the pop-culture landscape.

There he is on the cover of this month's Vanity Fair, staring out from the racks of trendier checkout counters everywhere. There he is in intrepid pose on the front of his new biography, "Dispatches From the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival" — for which publisher HarperCollins reportedly ponied up $1 million that he's largely donating to charity. He's a frequent guest on "Oprah" and this week was scheduled to sub for Regis Philbin on "Live With Regis and Kelly." In the fall, he joins the "60 Minutes" team, in addition to his regular two-hour nightly gig as the host of CNN's "Anderson Cooper 3600."

That's quite a bit of ink and air time for a journalist whose stock in trade is telling stories about other people. Because of that, Cooper has taken some editorial slaps from critics who claim that many of the tragedies he's covered — from Bosnia to Somalia to, most famously, Hurricane Katrina, where he angrily confronted Louisiana's U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu — take a back seat to his earnest persona.

His book, which intercuts between the global strife that Cooper has witnessed and the pain he suffered after the death of his father and suicide of his older brother, was dismissed by the Chicago Tribune as "overwrought scribbling" and "like its author, thin gruel." The slightly more charitable Publishers Weekly said it "reaffirms a troubling cultural shift in news coverage: Journalists used to cover the story; now, more than ever, they are the story."

But Cooper, the son of designer/railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt and writer Wyatt Emory Cooper, maintains he has no interest in celebrity. "I don't read articles about myself," he says by phone from New York. "I don't think there's any benefit to paying attention to what's in the ether out there about you. It would make me think about myself in a different way. I like working on the stories I'm telling, not the stories told about me."

Cooper, who celebrated his 39th birthday on Saturday, says those who bash his approach in the book miss the point. "It's a memoir of loss, both professional and personal," he elaborates. "It's a little unfair to critique the book for putting myself in it. I'm not pretending it's something other than what it is. If one's expecting just a book about Hurricane Katrina or the war in Bosnia, that's something else ... I made a point to put my own loss in perspective ... When you see dozens of people who died or lost multiple family members, what I experienced was kind of miniscule."

As for his other appearances, such as "Oprah," he says they can be used to throw a spotlight on issues he cares about. With "60 Minutes," he's doing only five stories and it's not new territory, as he has done investigative reports for "60 Minutes II" previously.

"I'm not sure what (overexposure) means. I'm on (CNN) every night so there's not much I can do about that," he says. "But what's cool about Oprah is that she can focus on topics that don't get a lot of coverage. For her, I did stories about poverty in Detroit and inner-city schools in Washington. For me, I'm passionate about a lot of subjects that don't normally get covered."

Cooper says the knock that he calculatedly wears his bleeding heart on his sleeve is unfair. Explains Cooper, "If I was emotional, it wasn't part of some plan."

And it remains to be seen how TV viewers feel about Cooper. After a ratings spike during and after his dramatic reportage of Hurricane Katrina, the numbers appear to be fading. According to the New York Post, his April ratings were down about 36 percent with younger viewers, a group CNN seemed to be gunning for when they had Cooper replace the more old-fashioned Aaron Brown in the prime-time spot.

FREELANCE BEGINNINGS

"CNN is competing with Fox, and to win this ratings battle, they're trying to reinvent themselves, and it's almost like 'If we can't beat 'em, join 'em,' " says Andrew Clark, an assistant professor in the Communications Department at the University of Texas-Arlington who specializes in broadcast and cable issues. "They looked around; he's got the image, he's got the connections, let's put him in there and see what happens."

For someone who bears much of the weight of an entire news network on his shoulders, Cooper's journalistic beginnings were fairly modest, though graced by good luck. He grew up in New York luxury and graduated from Yale with a political science degree, but he had always enjoyed pushing himself to extremes, "taking survival courses, month-long mountaineering expeditions in the Rockies, sea-kayaking in Mexico," as he writes in his book. Later, he would live for a year in Vietnam, studying Vietnamese.

This blossomed into an interest in world affairs in general and being a foreign correspondent in particular. He landed a gig as a fact-checker at Channel One, a news program broadcast to high schools, but he quickly grew bored. So he quit, persuaded a friend to lend him a hi-8 video camera and decided to freelance his way around the world. He doesn't recommend the approach for others and concedes he was motivated in part by not being able to deal with the emotional numbness he felt in 1978 after the death of his dad from a heart attack at the age of 50 and then a decade later when his brother, Carter, jumped from the 14th floor of his mom's Manhattan apartment building.

"I worried I couldn't 'follow my bliss' because I couldn't feel my bliss; I couldn't feel anything at all," he writes. "I wanted to be someplace where emotions are palpable, where the pain outside matched the pain I was feeling inside ... I wanted to teach myself to survive, learn from others who had. War seemed like my only option."

His first freelance stint included sneaking into Burma, now Myanmar, a military dictatorship. Channel One liked his stories so much that they re-hired him, but this time as a reporter. Then he was off to Bosnia, and later, Somalia and Rwanda. By 1995, he was a correspondent for ABC News and a co-anchor on their overnight "ABC World News Now." He even dipped into reality TV, hosting "The Mole" for two seasons, before returning to hard news in 2001 by moving to CNN.

Because the trajectory of his career has been fueled in part by not being able to fully take in his dad and brother's deaths, he finds it amusing that his critics chide him for being too emotional in his news reports. "It's funny I have that tag, because I'm pretty unemotional," he says. "Part of what the book is about is that."

Cooper, who was voted one of People magazine's sexiest men alive last year and remains a columnist at the lifestyle magazine Details, is the subject of much Internet debate and interest. He refuses to divulge much about his private life, but he sees no contradiction between that stance and exposing his feelings about his father and brother.

"I do consider myself a private person, but these things are known, and my mom had written about my brother's death before," he says. "I've been getting e-mails and response from people who've gone through similar things ... To me, it's not a book specifically about me, but it's a specific topic that I'm talking about."